
Prairie birds — including Illinois' dapper bobolink — in steep decline, study says
By no means depleted, the plucky visitor goes on to dazzle the females of his species with a high-energy courtship display in which he soars over wildflower-studded fields, flapping his wings rapidly and singing a bright, burbling tune.
In the vast nature preserves surrounding the city, he is joined by the crafty eastern meadowlark, the elusive Henslow's sparrow, the stubby grasshopper sparrow, the tiny sedge wren and the gold-splashed dickcissel.
'If you go to a grassland in the Chicago area — if it's big enough — you're going to see those birds,' said Chicago Bird Alliance President Judy Pollock. 'The whole area used to look like that so it's kind of like going back in time.'
But if iconic grassland birds still appear to flourish here, the story is very different when the camera pans out across the Midwest and the Great Plains, according to the latest State of the Birds Report by scientists at U.S. bird conservation groups.
The nation's grassland birds, spread across 320 million acres in 14 states, have declined 43% since 1970, more than any other category, and are 'in crisis,' according to the report, released in March.
Overall, the study found that about a third of American bird species are of high or moderate conservation concern.
Even duck populations — previously a bright spot, with strong increases since 1970 — have trended downward in recent years, the report said.
'The bird conservation community and scientists sounded the alarm in 2019 about these declines,' said Amanda Rodewald, a professor and senior director at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Center for Avian Population Studies.
'We're a little over five years out and we're seeing they're becoming steeper — some of these trends. We know this is happening. We're now showing we have tools and data sets (that can help) managers and decision-makers to know specifically where they need to direct some conservation. What we need is the will to act.'
The study encourages practices such as coastal restoration, conservation ranching and seabird translocation, or transporting birds to locations where they are likely to thrive.
For grassland birds, which are losing 1 million to 2 million acres of habitat annually in the Great Plains, the study highlights solutions such as improved grazing practices for cattle and sheep, invasive plant removal, investment in grassland conservation and converting low-quality cropland to grassland.
The landmark 2019 study, which found that the North American bird population had dropped by nearly 3 billion since 1970, focused on the nation as a whole, while the new study focuses on birds that require certain specific habitats, such as forests and coastlines.
Those birds are better indicators of change in a particular habitat because they don't just dip in and out of it — they depend on it for survival.
In the case of grassland birds, including those in Illinois, the news isn't good. The study says birds that need grassland habitat are in crisis.
One measure the study looked at was 'tipping point' species status, which signals that a bird has lost more than 50% of its population within the past 50 years.
Shorebirds had the most tipping point species, with 19. Grassland birds had eight tipping point species, including the plucky bobolink and another Chicago classic, the Henslow's sparrow.
The bobolink was listed as an 'orange-alert' tipping point species, second only to the 'red-alert' category. Orange-alert status is for birds showing 'long-term population losses and accelerated recent declines within the past decade.'
The Henslow's sparrow was listed as a 'yellow-alert' with 'long-term population losses but relatively stable recent trends' and 'continued conservation efforts needed to sustain recovery.'
A total of 9% of the breeding population of Henslow's sparrows and 5% of the breeding population of meadowlarks are in Illinois, according to Jim Giocomo, the American Bird Conservancy's central region director.
The study's findings are important in part, he said, because humans live in the same environment as birds.
'Birds are literally our canary in the coal mine,' he said. 'The bird needs the same stuff we do but reacts to changes in the environment faster.'
Water availability, air pollution, chemicals and the decline of insect populations all can affect birds.
The eastern meadowlark, a fairly common sight for grassland birders in the Chicago area, wasn't singled out for concern in the study. But the LeConte's sparrow, lark bunting and western meadowlark — all grassland birds — were among the species that experienced the largest declines in the Midwest and Great Plains.
The LeConte's sparrow migrates through Illinois, and some western meadowlarks summer here. Lark buntings are generally found farther west.
The Chicago-area birding community has been working to restore grassland habitat for at least 20 years, according to Pollock, and forest preserve districts in and around Chicago have made good progress.
The Forest Preserves of Cook County, for instance, has removed trees and connected pieces of land to create sprawling prairies for grassland birds, which nest on the ground.
'They need really large areas to hide their nests from predators,' Pollock said. 'One hundred acres is small for them. They really want 1,000, 2,000 acres.'
The big grassland preserves in the region include Bartel Grassland and Bobolink Meadow near Tinley Park, Orland Grassland near Orland Park, Busse Woods near Elk Grove Village and Paul Douglas Preserve in Hoffman Estates.
A 2022 study by the nonprofit Bird Conservation Network found that dozens of birds, including the Henslow's sparrow, are doing surprisingly well in Chicago — likely because of the region's many parks and nature preserves, which cover nearly 10% of land in the six-county area.
Of 104 key species tracked in the study, 56% had stable or increasing populations in the Chicago region, while only 37% were stable or increasing in other areas of the state.
At the time, only about 410,000 breeding Henslow's sparrows remained in the world, and the birds were declining nationally.
However, the conservation network study found the birds were up an average of 3.4% per year in the Chicago area.
The bobolink was a different story, with the study finding the local bobolink population was down 2.9% per year since 1999.
Among the possible explanations: A lot of restored grasslands in the area tend to be dominated by tall grasses, and bobolinks may prefer a mix of grasses and flowering plants, Bird Conservation Network President Eric Secker told the Tribune in 2022. It was also possible that an international decline in insects, which is increasingly of concern to scientists, may have been reducing the birds' food supply.
Lastly, the problem may not have been limited to this region — or even this country, he said. Bobolinks are poisoned by farmers in Central and South America, where the birds feed on crops.
Solutions to the grassland bird decline vary among regions, although all rely on increasing or improving habitat. In the Great Plains, Rodewald highlighted the work of the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, which encourages voluntary conservation by farmers and ranchers.
'People rely on the land for their livelihoods, and so any approaches that we're using to preserve birds in those areas needs to be really grounded in voluntary conservation measures,' Rodewald said.
In Illinois, 'agricultural intensification,' in which farmers squeeze more production out of their land, is a major contributor to grassland bird decline, she said. Agricultural intensification means bigger farms, larger single-crop areas, less rest for the land, fewer hedgerows and more chemicals.
Among the potential solutions: The government can give farmers financial incentives to return land to a more natural state, as in the farm bill's conservation reserve program.
The farm bill is a comprehensive package of legislation that sets agriculture and food policy and is supposed to be updated every five years. The 2018 farm bill has been extended twice as Republicans and Democrats argue about what should be included.
Bobolink-conscious management of hay fields also can help in Illinois, Pollock said. The birds lay several sets of eggs in the course of a summer, and mowing can prove fatal to the young.
'They're crunching up lots of baby bobolinks, and other grassland birds,' Pollock said.
The solutions include mowing in May, which discourages nesting. That's a good approach when conditions are right, Pollock said, but sometimes it's too wet to mow.
Rodewald said data on birds has improved, thanks to the efforts of volunteers and advances such as the popular eBird app, which allows everyday birders to submit detailed reports on their sightings.
'It's really adding to our ability to detect and diagnose population changes — and that, fundamentally, allows us to respond to them in ways that are more proactive, more cost-efficient and more effective on the ground,' she said.
For example, scientists can use eBird data to determine where installing a solar array is least likely to affect a sensitive bird population, or where a conservation measure — say, adding more trees — can benefit humans as well as birds.
'Despite the bad news, I think that because we have more information than ever and knowledge is power, we do have reason to hope,' Rodewald said.
nschoenberg@chicagotribune.com
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National Geographic
2 hours ago
- National Geographic
Are orange cats really the goofiest cats? Genetics may have an answer.
The best science on ginger feline behavior hints, yeah, there might be something special about them. Orange cats are said to have goofy personalities. Is that really true? Photograph by Christina Gandolfo, Alamy Stock Photo Hanging from lamps, catapulting off countertops, tackling the dog, biting your legs unexpectedly—there are many wacky behaviors associated with orange cats, often captured on TikTok, whose owners swear are extra derpy, slapdash, and yet also friendly to a fault. But scientifically speaking, are orange cats actually any different than cats of other colors? For starters, orange cats are not a breed, like British shorthair or Siamese. Cats of many breeds, from Maine coons and munchkins to American bobtails and Siberians, can have orange colorations. Which perhaps makes it all the weirder that orange cat aficionados claim that orange cat behaviors transcend breed. Earlier this year scientists identified the gene responsible for the orange coat coloration found in cats. It's called ARHGAP36. But as to whether orange coloration also comes with a suite of behaviors or personality traits, much less is known. (Surprising things you never knew about your cat) In 2015, a small study published in the journal Anthrozoös used an anonymous online poll to find that people were at least more likely to attribute the trait 'friendliness' to orange cats than other cat colors. And a larger study published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior in the same year also found some support to the idea that orange cats are distinct. 'We found that most of the differences are breed-related, but there were also some differences related to coat color,' says Carlo Siracusa, a clinical scientist at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and senior author of the study. Lilac-colored cats, for instance, were found to be more playful and more likely to experience separation anxiety. Piebald cats, or those with white patches, had decreased vocalization scores. And cats with a tortoiseshell pattern were less aggressive toward dogs. But orange cats? 'It's interesting that you mention orange cats being more outgoing, more gregarious, because actually, we found the opposite,' says Siracusa. 'They were more likely to show fear-related aggressions towards unfamiliar people.' Orange cats were also linked to a heightened interest in prey. Digging into the science on orange cats While Siracusa's research may be some of the best we have when it comes to attributing any behavior to cat colors, he is quick to qualify the findings. 'Our assessment was done through questions sent to owners. It was not done via direct observation,' he says. 'Every time you use a questionnaire, you are assuming the risk of bias, because you are asking people what they think about something.' Therefore, it may just be that the idea of orange cats being extra sassy is so prominent, that bias is showing up in studies. Even with that knowledge though, Siracusa says biases are often grounded in experience. And as someone who handles cats on a regular basis, he has his own experience-based beliefs, such as male cats being more outgoing than females. 'My perception itself, at this point, is a bias,' he laughs. Orange cat behavior—what we do know Even without a slam-dunk study connecting a cat's orange-ness to its personality, there are hints at a biological link. Remember the ARHGAP36 gene that provides orange coloration? Well, it's linked to the X-chromosome. This explains why orange cats are more likely to be male, the authors report in the study published in Current Biology. Female cats have two X chromosomes. And that means they must possess two copies of the gene in order to produce orange coloration. But males, which have XY chromosomes, need just one copy of ARHGAP36, to develop orange colorations. Perhaps this is the real answer to orange cat quirkiness: Siracusa tends to think that, in general, male cats are more outgoing. But, here's where things get interesting. As scientists learn more about genes and how they influence development, they have learned that any given gene is often linked with a variety of downstream traits. For instance, people with red hair have a variant of the melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R) gene, which may also be linked to a higher tolerance of pain and reduced effectiveness of anesthesia. Now, in studies of humans and mice, the ARHGAP36 gene is expressed in the brain and hormonal glands. Even more interestingly, the cells that give fur or skin color, known as pigment cells, actually begin their development in the neural crest cells of an embryo. (Here's how your cat experiences the world) These cells can also 'differentiate into neurons and endocrine cells that produce catecholamines, which are known to control activity and excitability,' says Hiroyuki Sasaki, an emeritus professor and geneticist at Kyushu University in Japan, in an email. 'It thus seems possible that the DNA mutation in the gene could cause changes in temperaments and behaviors,' says Sasaki, who is senior author on the study. 'I should like to stress, however, that this is just a speculation.' Cats are individuals, too Even if there was some scientific underpinning for ginger cat behavior, the scientists stress, there would always likely be exceptions to the rules. 'This is what we see in the clinics every day,' says Siracusa, who says clients frequently tell him they selected a certain breed or color pet for its prescribed behavior. 'And then they have an animal that behaves in a completely opposite manner, and they are shocked,' he says. (How diverse personalities help animals survive) With nearly 74 million pet cats in the United States alone, you might wonder how it is that anything remains a mystery about the companion animals. But questions that are not linked to urgent human or animal health issues often go overlooked and underfunded, says Sasaki. 'Our world is still full of mystery, and there are so many unanswered questions around us, including those that may seem very simple,' says Sasaki.


Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
NASA and the End of American Ambition
In the beginning, there was the name. A prophet guided Errol Musk to bestow it on his eldest son, or so he claimed. The seer was Wernher von Braun, a German engineer and an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Though von Braun had built missiles for Hitler and used concentration-camp prisoners for manual labor, the U.S. government recruited him, and eventually brought him to a base in Alabama and tasked him with sending men into orbit, then to the moon. Von Braun had always dreamed of venturing deeper into the galaxy. Back in 1949, before he emerged as the godfather of the American space program, he spilled his fantasies onto the page, in a novel titled Project Mars. He described how a new form of government would take hold on the red planet: a technocracy capable of the biggest and boldest things. At the helm of this Martian state would sit a supreme leader, known as the Elon. Whatever the truth of this origin story, Elon Musk has seized on von Braun's prophecy as his destiny. Since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, his business decisions and political calculations have been made with a transcendent goal in mind: the moment when he carries the human species to a new homeland, a planet millions of miles away, where colonists will be insulated from the ravages of nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will inevitably crush life on Earth. Far away from the old, broken planet, a libertarian utopia will flourish, under the beneficent sway of the Elon. This sense of destiny led Musk on October 5, 2024, to a Trump rally in western Pennsylvania. Wearing a gray T-shirt bearing the slogan OCCUPY MARS, Musk told the crowd that Trump 'must win to preserve democracy in America.' Thanks to their alliance, Musk briefly achieved powers that few unelected Americans have ever possessed. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, he demolished large swaths of the federal government and began to remake the infrastructure of the state. For a few erratic months, he assumed the role of the terrestrial Elon. Five months into Trump's second term, Musk's inflated sense of his place in history clashed with the ego of his benefactor, the relationship ruptured, and each man threatened to ruin the other. Musk vowed that his spaceships would no longer carry Americans, or the supplies that sustain them, to the International Space Station. Trump threatened SpaceX's federal contracts, reportedly worth $22 billion. Weeks later, they were still bludgeoning each other. In July, Trump mused that he might deport the South African–born Musk, who in turn impishly announced that he would bankroll a new third party. Both men are likely bluffing. Musk still needs the U.S. government to fund his grand designs. And the U.S. government very much needs Elon Musk. Last year, 95 percent of the rockets launched in the United States were launched by SpaceX. NASA was a mere passenger. Musk has crowded low Earth orbit with satellites (nearly 8,000) that are becoming indispensable to the military's capacity to communicate and the government's surveillance of hostile powers. Even if Trump had pushed to dislodge Musk, he couldn't. No rival could readily replace the services his companies provide. That Musk has superseded NASA is a very American parable. A generation ago, NASA was the crown jewel of the U.S. government. It was created in 1958 to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life, and it succeeded brilliantly. In the course of landing humans on the lunar surface, NASA became the symbol of America's competence and swagger, of how it—alone among the nations of the Earth—inhabited the future. NASA's astronauts were 20th-century cowboys, admired in corners of the world that usually abhorred Americans. The Apollo crews traveled to the heavens on behalf of 'all mankind,' a phrase that appeared both in the act that created NASA and on the plaque left on the moon by Apollo 11. Even NASA's engineers, with their skinny ties and rolled-up sleeves, became the stuff of Hollywood legend. NASA was born at the height of liberalism's faith in government, and its demise tracks the decline of that faith. As the United States lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to Musk as a potential savior, and ultimately surrendered to him. This isn't an instance of crony capitalism, but a tale about well-meaning administrations, of both parties, pursuing grandiose ambitions without the vision, competence, or funding to realize them. If the highest goal of policy is efficiency, then all the money that the government has spent on SpaceX makes sense. Even the company's most vituperative detractors acknowledge its engineering genius and applaud its success in driving down launch expenses (unlike many defense contractors, SpaceX largely eats the cost of its failures). But in the course of bolstering Musk, in privatizing a public good, the government has allowed one billionaire to hold excessive sway. With the flick of a switch, he now has the power to shut down constellations of satellites, to isolate a nation, to hobble the operations of an entire army. Because of Musk's indispensability, his values have come to dominate America's aspirations in space, draining the lyricism from the old NASA mission. Space was once a realm of cooperation, beyond commercial interests and military pursuits. Now it is the site of military brinkmanship and a source of raw materials that nations hope to plunder. The humanistic pursuit of the mysteries of the universe has been replaced by an obsession with rocket power. Musk wants to use his influence to impose the improbable endeavor of Mars colonization on the nation, enriching him as it depletes its own coffers. In the vacuum left by a nation's faded ambitions, Musk's delusions of destiny have taken hold. NASA's golden age emerged from fiasco. John F. Kennedy campaigned for president promising a 'New Frontier,' but he didn't really care about satellites or astronauts. Just before he launched his campaign, he confided to one scientist over drinks in Boston that he considered rockets a waste of money. A few years later, during a conversation recorded in the White House, he flatly admitted, 'I'm not that interested in space.' But by the third month of his presidency, Kennedy was drowning in humiliation. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets hurled the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—or Gaga, as the international press adoringly called him—into orbit for 108 minutes, the first human to journey into the beyond. The New York Times hailed it as evidence of 'Soviet superiority.' The impression of American incompetence deepened five days later, when a CIA-backed army of exiles botched an invasion of Cuba, a misadventure immortalized as the Bay of Pigs. In his desperation to redirect the narrative, Kennedy abruptly became an enthusiast for the most ambitious plan sitting on NASA's shelf. On April 21, shortly after his proxy army surrendered to the Communists, Kennedy suffered a bruising press conference. In response to a question about the relative inferiority of the American space program, he riffed, 'If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.' A month later, Kennedy delivered an address to a joint session of Congress that more formally launched the Apollo program. Even then, he did so harboring private doubts about the price tag, perhaps stoked by the fact that his own father considered his promise to land an astronaut on the lunar surface by 1970 an appalling act of profligacy. Joe Kennedy fumed, 'Damn it, I taught Jack better than that.' When Kennedy voiced his ambitions, he stumbled into tautology: 'We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.' He charged the American government with executing an engineering task more difficult than any other in human history, for no higher reason than to prove that it could be done. That was the animating spirit of 'New Frontier' liberalism. From the vantage of the present—when public faith in government is threadbare—it is staggering to consider the heedless investment Americans allowed Washington to make in a project with little tangible payoff, beyond the pursuit of global prestige in its zero-sum contest with the Soviet Union. At its peak, Apollo employed a workforce of about 400,000. The lunar program cost an astonishing $28 billion, somewhere north of $300 billion in today's dollars. On Kennedy's own terms, Apollo was a world-historic triumph. The legendary NASA chief James Webb and his deputies helped create a whole new philosophy for running immense organizations: systems management. NASA simultaneously micromanaged its engineers—knowing that an unwanted speck of dust could trigger catastrophe—while giving them wide latitude to innovate. Complex flowcharts helped coordinate the work of dozens of teams across academia, corporations, and government laboratories. Despite using untested technologies, NASA achieved a near-perfect safety record, marred only by the 1967 fire that killed three astronauts in their capsule as they prepared for the first crewed Apollo mission. Even then, NASA's relentless culture kept pushing toward its goal. Unlike the Soviets, who attempted to dictate public perceptions by manically managing the images of their exploits, NASA made the risky decision to allow its project to unfurl on live television. The Apollo voyages made for the most gripping viewing in the history of the medium. By one estimate, a fifth of the planet watched Neil Armstrong's moonwalk live, an especially astonishing number given the limited global reach of television in 1969. The space program then was a projection of prowess and self-confidence. 'Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched,' Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in his memoir. 'If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.' Apollo was a model for planned social change and technocratic governance—the prototype for tomorrow. The savviest bureaucrats are hitmakers. Years before Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon, NASA had begun prepping plans for a sequel to Apollo. Only after the enchanted moment of the lunar touchdown did the agency meet with Vice President Spiro Agnew to unveil the next phase of America's future in space. On August 4, 1969, 15 days after Armstrong's giant leap, NASA pitched the Nixon administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars. To nail the presentation, NASA brought von Braun, its most celebrated engineer, to do the talking. After all, they were selling the vision he had sketched in his novel decades earlier. By 1982, NASA said, it hoped to land on Mars in two nuclear-powered planetary vehicles, each carrying six crew members. But in NASA's moment of glory, von Braun and his colleagues couldn't restrain themselves. They added items to their wish list: a lunar base, a space station, and a shuttle that would transport humans. Pandering before the ego that NASA needed most in order to realize its request, von Braun said he wanted to send Richard Nixon into orbit as part of the nation's celebration of its bicentennial, in 1976. Agnew loved it. Nixon did not. He must have despised the thought of shoveling so much money into a program so closely associated with the blessed memory of his old nemesis John Kennedy. Besides, the moment of boundless technocracy was over, doomed by deficits and a sharp swerve in the public mood. During the unending debacle of Vietnam, the public had lost faith in grand ventures dreamed up by whiz kids. Meanwhile, civil-rights leaders railed against the diversion of major expenditures away from social programs. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni popularized a term that captured the rising sourness: moon-doggle. At a moment when Nixon was hoping to retrench, NASA proposed a program with an annual cost that would eventually rise to $10 billion, carried out over more than a decade—an expense far greater than Apollo's. Von Braun and his colleagues had badly misread the room. In the end, Nixon agreed to give NASA an annual budget of just over $3 billion, and he scythed away every component of the plan except for the space station and the space shuttle, which was a reusable system that promised to limit the costs of space travel. But a shuttle traveling where? As Apollo wrapped up its final missions—and even three of those were canceled—NASA no longer had a clear destination. Many of the leaders who carried the agency through the space race, including von Braun, began to depart for the private sector. During Apollo, government engineers had been omnipresent, stationed in the factories of its contractors; they mastered details. That changed in the shuttle era, with its constricted budgets and diminished expectations. Instead of micromanaging contractors, NASA began to defer to them, giving aerospace corporations greater sway over vessel design. In fact, it allowed them to own the underlying intellectual property for the vehicles and their component parts. Because the contractors understood the minutiae and they didn't, NASA officials grew reluctant to push for innovations, paralyzed by the fear that they might be blamed for a contractor's mistake. A bureaucratic mindset took hold, first slowly, and then more dramatically after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. Freeman Dyson, the visionary astrophysicist, drew a devastating distinction between the 'paper NASA,' largely a figment of memory and pop culture, and the 'real NASA,' the sclerotic organization that rose in its place. Those criticisms were both legitimate and somewhat unfair; in the shadow of crewed spaceflight, which garnered attention and prestige, NASA pursued advances in robotics and astrophysics, such as the Galileo mission to Jupiter. But without a human on board, those accomplishments lacked the romance of NASA's golden age. In the summer of 2001, Elon Musk sat in a Manhattan hotel room, fired up his laptop, and browsed He had just returned from a party on Long Island. On the ride home, he'd told a friend, 'I've always wanted to do something in space, but I don't think there's anything that an individual can do.' Musk was plenty rich and plenty bored. After a short stint as the CEO of the company that became PayPal, he was ousted by its board, although he remained its largest shareholder. He had bought a Czechoslovakian military jet, which he'd spent hundreds of hours flying, but that hardly held his attention. He was in search of his next thing. Musk grew up a fan of science fiction, steeped in the extraterrestrial fantasies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The reality of space exploration, however, wasn't a subject that he'd studied closely, until he scanned NASA's site and had a revelation. He assumed that he would read about impending missions to Mars. 'I figured it had to be soon, because we went to the moon in 1969, so we must be about to go to Mars,' he told the biographer Walter Isaacson. But no such plan existed, so he decided that it was his mission to push humanity forward. The thought made Musk something of a cliché. Space is a magnet for rich dilettantes and—more than a sports car or yacht—the ultimate expression of wealth and power. Because space travel is ingrained in our culture as the hardest human endeavor, demanding immense resources, it commands cultural respect. For Musk—who had been bullied by both his schoolmates and his father—space offered the possibility of seizing the world by the lapels and announcing his greatness. A classic revenge fantasy. Musk wasn't wrong about the diminished state of NASA. Remarking on the grim persistence of the space-shuttle program, Neil deGrasse Tyson said that NASA's flagship vessel 'boldly went where man had gone hundreds of times before'—135 times, to be precise. These missions were essential to the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, but never ventured beyond the familiar confines of low Earth orbit. Even as Russia was losing the Cold War, it was winning the final chapters of the space race, fielding a program that was better conceived and more active. Indeed, when Musk first pondered launching rockets, he went to Russia in hope of buying used ones; this entailed sitting through vodka-drenched meals with apparatchiks hoping to bilk him. In the end, he concluded that it was cheaper to make his own. In 2002, he founded SpaceX. Musk was a salesman, determined to make Washington turn its head—and sink cash into his start-up, housed in a suburban– Los Angeles warehouse, which was just beginning to cobble together its first rockets. In 2003, he trucked a seven-story rocket to D.C. and parked it outside the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Soon enough, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave him several million dollars to help grow SpaceX. In 2006, NASA awarded him $278 million for the first installment of a new program called Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. He received these grants even though SpaceX hadn't successfully launched a rocket. (Musk and the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.) For years, NASA had leaned on the same old set of big contractors: Northrop Grumman, Rockwell, Boeing. These were stodgy firms, anchors in the military-industrial complex, codependent on the government, with their own bureaucracies. Their projects tended to swell in cost and underperform. NASA officials knew these organization's failings and were desperate to reverse them. The shuttle program was scheduled for imminent retirement, but what would replace it? There was still a space station floating in low Earth orbit, with astronauts awaiting resupply. At the dawn of the 21st century, disruption was the magic word, incanted by investors and fetishized in the media. It was only a matter of time before the government began chasing the same trendy idea, betting that a new group of entrepreneurs would arrive on the scene to create companies that would shatter all the old models. In 2010, Barack Obama canceled Constellation, George W. Bush's program for returning to the moon. NASA was getting out of the business of owning spaceships and rockets—instead, it would rent ones owned by private firms. When Obama visited the Kennedy Space Center to announce this change in direction, he viewed one of Musk's Falcon 9 rockets, which was sitting on a launchpad. Photographers captured the young president and the budding billionaire strolling together, a passing of the torch to Musk. Although he isn't usually generous with sharing credit for his successes, even Musk admits that the Obama administration rescued SpaceX. Burning through cash and crashing test rockets, his company was nearing collapse. But the change in policy opened a reservoir of funds for him. At SpaceX's bleakest moment, which Musk also describes as 'the worst year of my life,' NASA awarded it a $1.6 billion contract to carry cargo to the International Space Station. In his state of relief and jubilation, Musk changed his computer password to 'ilovenasa.' Of all the emerging firms in the age of commercial spaceflight, SpaceX was the most deserving of success. Musk had an eye for engineering talent, and he preached an audacious vision, which attracted young idealists. Impatient, he questioned truisms and cut costs with unrelenting intensity, even if it meant buying a tool on eBay to align a rocket. Despite its strengths, SpaceX couldn't triumph in this new age, because the idea of commercialization was inherently flawed. There wasn't a market for rocket launches, asteroid mining, or spacesuit design. For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government. That realization ultimately prodded Musk into another line of business. In 2015, he created Starlink. His rockets would launch satellites into orbit to supply Earth with internet service, a far more lucrative business. Starlink turned SpaceX into a behemoth. Because SpaceX was constantly launching rockets—and not just for NASA—it kept gaining invaluable new data and insights, which allowed it to produce cheaper, better rockets. Because nothing is more exciting to an engineer than actually launching things, the company drained talent from its competition. Musk's goal wasn't to achieve the banal status of monopolist. 'The lens of getting to Mars has motivated every SpaceX decision,' Musk told Isaacson. When he created Starlink, he did so because it would supply him with the capital to build rockets powerful enough to carry humanity to Mars. Musk, who describes himself as a 'cultural Christian,' is not an especially religious person. But his imagination is fixed on the end of days—the possibility of an 'extinction event'—because his childhood experiences push his adult anxieties in the direction of the catastrophic. In South Africa, he came of age amid the decaying of the apartheid state, which had once promised to safeguard his racial caste. His family, like his society, was fracturing. When he was 8, his parents divorced. He now recalls his father as a monstrous figure. 'Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,' Musk once told Rolling Stone. (Errol Musk told Rolling Stone that 'he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone,' and later said that his son's comments were about their political differences at the time.) Given this turbulence—and the paucity of reliable authority in his early life—it's hardly surprising that Musk would fear the worst. He found refuge from the world's harsh realities in the pages of sci-fi novels. But visions of apocalypse are the genre's elemental motif, and the fiction he devoured often magnified his dread. Musk sought out works that offered both cause for despair and a vision of transcendence. Those Asimov novels featured hyperrational heroes, many of them engineers, who saved humanity by building space colonies where civilization could begin anew. Musk borrowed his self-conception from these protagonists. From an early age, the colonization of Mars became Musk's idée fixe. At various points, he has described his companies as contributing to that overarching mission. Tesla's Cybertrucks are vehicles that could be adapted to traverse the Martian terrain; its solar panels, a potential energy source for a future colony. He has even reportedly claimed that his social-media platform, X, could serve as an experiment in decentralized governance—testing how a Martian outpost might use consensus as the basis for lawmaking, because he envisions a minimalist government on the red planet. At SpaceX, Musk's employees have begun sketching the contours of life on Mars. One team is designing housing and communal spaces; Musk has already named the first Martian city Terminus, after a planetary colony in Asimov's novels. Other teams are developing spacesuits tailored to the planet's harsh environment and exploring the feasibility of human reproduction there. (When The New York Times reported on these teams, Musk denied their existence.) No engineering challenge in human history rivals the audacity of making Mars a place humans can call home. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, calls it a 'fixer-upper' planet, a hilarious understatement. Mars's atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide and laced with nitrogen, among other elements and a smattering of toxins. Temperatures can plunge to –225 degrees Fahrenheit. My colleague Ross Andersen once memorably described what would happen to a human body on Mars: 'If you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds.' Even with a suit, protection would be tenuous: Cosmic radiation would seep through, and Martian dust storms—filled with abrasive, electrically charged particles—could bypass seams and seals. These impossible conditions are compounded by Mars's distance from Earth. Launches are feasible only about once every 26 months, when the planets' orbits align to minimize travel time and fuel requirements. Even then, it takes roughly eight months for a spacecraft to reach Mars, making it exceedingly difficult to resupply a colony or rescue its inhabitants. When challenged about these mortal dangers, Musk is disarmingly relaxed, and has said that he himself would make the journey. 'People will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States,' he told Isaacson. 'But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.' To warm the planet, he proposes detonating nuclear bombs over Mars's poles, which he claims could induce a greenhouse effect—an idea he relishes, perhaps as a troll. SpaceX once sold T-shirts bearing the slogan Nuke Mars. According to a top scientist at the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, it would take more than 10,000 nuclear-tipped missiles to carry out Musk's plan. Even Wernher von Braun's fictional doppelgänger, Dr. Strangelove, might have winced at such breezy talk of thermonuclear explosions. President Kennedy was also willing to take absurd risks in pursuit of cosmic ambition, invoking the Cold War imperative to 'bear any burden.' But he did so to demonstrate national greatness. Musk is seeking to spend trillions—and risk human lives—to demonstrate his own. Because his reality emerges from fiction, Musk is untethered from any sense of earthly constraints. His sense of his own role in the plot emerges from his desire to leap into myth. Musk's fixation on Mars also functions as a kind of ancestor worship, echoing a family mythology of flight from decline. In 1950, his grandfather Joshua Haldeman left Canada for South Africa in search of a freer society—one he believed could withstand the collapse of Western civilization. Haldeman's doomsday rhetoric railed against Jewish bankers and 'hordes of Coloured people,' whom he claimed were being manipulated to destroy 'White Christian Civilization.' In the rise of apartheid, he saw not repression but redemption, a last stand for the values he held sacred. Read: Elon Musk's anti-Semitic, apartheid-loving grandfather Like his grandfather, Musk is obsessed with staving off civilizational collapse. He does not voice his fears in openly racist terms—instead framing them in the language of freedom and survival—but he is fixated on the notion of a gene pool with diminishing intelligence. 'If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad,' he told the biographer Ashlee Vance. His rhetoric is provocative, but slippery enough to avoid outright extremism. Over years of statements, social-media posts, and interviews, however, a pattern has emerged: Musk sees Mars not merely as a lifeboat but as a laboratory—an opportunity to reengineer humanity. On a new planet, far from Earth's chaos and constraint, he imagines a society remade in his own image. This belief is rooted in a kind of technological social Darwinism, the idea that evolution can be steered, or even upgraded, by engineering. It's how he describes an animating premise of Neuralink, the company he co-founded that is developing brain-computer interfaces that aim to merge human cognition with machines and effectively create a species of cyborgs. The same spirit infuses Musk's obsession with procreation, and he's doing his part. He now has at least 14 children, by The Wall Street Journal 's count, with four biological mothers. In his worldview, apocalypse and salvation converge: Either we become a race of engineered brilliance, or we vanish, and Mars is the greatest opportunity for remaking humanity. In a sense, it follows a classic pattern of migration. The bold depart in search of opportunity, while those who remain face extinction. Survival becomes a test of worth. Those who stay behind will, by their inaction, mark themselves as unfit for the future. Once settlers arrive on Mars, Musk has suggested that life forms—possibly including humans—might be bioengineered to survive the planet's harsh environment. In one interview, he noted that humanity has long shaped organisms 'by sort of selective breeding.' Humans, he intimated, could be bred like cows. He's reportedly prepared to supply his own genetic material to the effort. Sources told the Times that Musk has offered to donate his sperm to help seed a Martian colony (which Musk later denied). Using a concept borrowed from Asimov's fiction, Musk says that Martian colonists will serve as 'the light of consciousness.' They are humanity's last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could follow Earth's destruction. But what's dark is his vision of abandoning Earth and investing the species' faith in a self-selected elite, one that mirrors Musk's own values, and perhaps even his traits. The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old NASA ideal: for all mankind. In the earliest hours of a spring morning, I drove across a Florida causeway, through a nature reserve filled with alligators and wild boars, to hallowed ground: Launch Complex 39A, once a stage for NASA's majesty. More than half a century ago, Apollo 11 began its ascent to the moon here. During the space race, it was perhaps the most exciting place on the planet, poised between glory and disaster: 11 Apollo missions lifted off from here, followed by 82 space-shuttle launches. NASA framed 39A for the television era: an enormous American flag fluttering at one end of the horizon, a giant digital countdown clock at the other. Even now, a weathered CBS News sign hangs on a small cinder-block building with a perfect view of the site—the same spot where Walter Cronkite once narrated liftoffs in his authoritative baritone. By 2013, the launchpad had become an expensive, unused relic, but because of its presence on the National Register of Historic Places, it couldn't be torn down. Musk coveted the site, as did his longtime competitor, Jeff Bezos. But at the time, Bezos didn't have a rocket capable of flying from 39A. SpaceX won the rights to lease the launchpad for the next 20 years. The old theater of American dreams now belonged to Musk. I arrived at 39A to watch the launch of Falcon 9—SpaceX's workhorse rocket, the height of a 20-story building—which would help deliver cargo to the International Space Station, circling in low Earth orbit. There's no alternative to the Falcon 9, and there's no rival to SpaceX. For the time being, the company is the only domestic entity, public or private, with the capacity to deliver crew and cargo to the space station. Lyndon Johnson once said that 'control of space means control of the world.' In his day, space was a way to project national strength to a global audience through displays of technical superiority. Today, it has become a domain of warfare, alongside land, sea, and air. Modern combat operations rely on space-based systems that guide munitions, coordinate communications, and spy on adversaries. Without dominance in orbit, terrestrial forces would be deaf, blind, and largely immobile. In 2019, then, the Pentagon created the Space Force as the sixth branch of the military. If space is power, then Musk's role is badly understated. It's no longer accurate to call him merely the world's richest earthling. The United States is now dependent on him in its quest to command space. Through its Starshield division, SpaceX provides space-based communication for the U.S. armed forces; its satellites can reportedly track hypersonic and ballistic missiles and extend the government's surveillance reach to nearly every corner of the globe. In April, the Space Force awarded SpaceX a majority of its contracts for a batch of national-security missions over the coming years. Some of this work involves agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office, placing it within the penumbra of classification. The true extent of the government's reliance on SpaceX is largely obscured, rarely scrutinized, and only loosely regulated. Yet the dependency is undeniable. If Musk were to withhold support—out of principle, pique, or profit motive—the government could find itself stranded. None of SpaceX's competitors yet possesses the capability to replace it. (A Space Force spokesperson said that it relies on 'a number of industry partners,' including SpaceX, and continues to seek 'to broaden the diversity of potential vendors,' adding that the Department of Defense 'exercises rigorous oversight' of its contracts. The spokesperson also denied claims that SpaceX's satellites track missiles.) The war in Ukraine has offered a chilling glimpse of the risks posed by Musk's role as interstellar gatekeeper. In the early days of the invasion, SpaceX rushed to supply Ukraine with Starlink terminals, helping to replace communications systems debilitated by Russian cyberattacks and advancing troops. It was a noble gesture and a strategic boon. Ukrainian forces, empowered by the new technology, coordinated scrappy, asymmetrical tactics that blunted Russian advances. But Musk's commitment soon wavered. In September 2022, SpaceX denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, effectively blocking a planned strike on Russian naval forces in Sevastopol. (Starting that fall, Musk began speaking with Vladimir Putin at length, according to the Journal, troubling the U.S. intelligence community.) In the months that followed, the company imposed new geographic limits on Starlink's use, restricting its application in areas where Ukraine might otherwise target Russia's vulnerabilities. Musk framed the move as an act of prudent restraint that would help avert World War III. But it also exposed an unsettling reality: Ukraine's battlefield operations were subject to the discretion of a single person. 'My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,' he posted on X. 'Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.' Musk's preeminence marks a profound shift in the history of American political economy. During the Cold War, the military-industrial complex was driven by corporations that operated as handmaidens to the state. They had outsize influence, but remained largely bureaucratic, gray-flannel institutions—cogs in a sprawling, profitable machine. Musk is different. Years of hagiographic media coverage and his immense social-media reach birthed legions of fanboys and nurtured a cult of personality. His achievements command awe. In the damp Florida night, I stood on a sandbank and trained my eyes on Launch Complex 39A as the countdown clock ticked toward zero. And then, without the benefit of Cronkite's narration, I watched the Falcon 9 violently part the darkness, with a payload bound for the space station. A few minutes later, a light appeared in the sky: The reusable rocket was returning home. Majestic and imperious, it cast a warm glow over the palm trees. For a moment this spring, Musk's grand ambitions seemed like they might buckle. In Washington, it had long been assumed that Musk and Trump would turn on each other. When it finally happened, the spark, fittingly, was NASA. Musk had pushed to install his friend Jared Isaacman as head of the agency—a move that stank of cronyism. In 2021, Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur, had paid SpaceX millions to chase a childhood dream of flying to space. That deal soon led to a friendship, and eventually, his company owning a stake in SpaceX itself. Read: MAGA goes to Mars When Trump soured on Musk, he struck where it hurt most. Annoyed after learning of Isaacman's past donations to Democratic campaigns, the president withdrew the nomination on May 31. Musk received the move as one in a string of betrayals and erupted online, warning that the Jeffrey Epstein files would implicate Trump and that the president's spending bill was a 'disgusting abomination.' The clash soon shifted to space. Musk threatened to decommission the spacecraft resupplying the International Space Station; Trump blustered that he would order a review of SpaceX's government contracts. Yet for all the rancor, there is no sign that SpaceX has actually suffered. Trump and Musk have dismembered the federal bureaucracy, but its old tendencies are still prevailing; the apparatus clings to the vendors that have delivered results. Even as Trump raged, Washington's dependence on Musk was growing. In June, a Space Force commander said that SpaceX will play a crucial part in the MILNET program, a new constellation of 480-plus satellites. Reportedly, the Pentagon will pay for it; the intelligence community will oversee it; Musk will run it. In its proposed 2026 budget, the Trump administration moved to bankroll Musk's deeper ambitions, albeit with a fraction of the gargantuan sum required. Trump has proposed spending $1 billion to accelerate a mission to Mars and fund the design of spacesuits, landing systems, and other technologies that would make a voyage feasible. The money spent on human space exploration will be pried from NASA's other programs, even as the agency's total budget is set to shrink by nearly 25 percent and its workforce by one-third. To fulfill Musk's cosmic destiny, the administration is gutting NASA's broader scientific mission—the thing that NASA does best. (When asked about this shift, a NASA spokesperson described 'leading the way in human exploration of our solar system' as the agency's 'core mission,' and added that it is 'contributing to a competitive market that will increase commercial innovation.') Human spaceflight has floundered for decades, haunted by its inability to replicate its greatest achievements and whipsawed by changing presidential priorities. And the importance of astronauts to the enterprise of exploration, which was always questionable, has further diminished as the quality of robots has improved. At the same time, and without attracting the same kind of fanfare, NASA continues to display extraordinary acumen in science; its research initiatives are arguably the most profound ventures in all of government. They address the greatest mysteries in the universe: How did life begin? Are we alone in the cosmos? The government—so often viewed as a soul-sapping bureaucracy—has helped supply answers to these most spiritual of questions. In the late 1980s and early '90s, the Cosmic Background Explorer provided empirical support for the Big Bang theory. In 2020, after the OSIRIS-REx probe reached the asteroid Bennu, it collected a sample from a type of primordial projectile thought to have delivered life's building blocks to early Earth. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA helped determine the age of the universe, affirmed the existence of dark energy, and extended humanity's gaze into distant galaxies and black holes. By capturing light from galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, one of NASA's telescopes has effectively peered into the universe's distant past. For all of Musk's mockery of NASA's supposed lack of ambition, the agency had already mounted a daring campaign to explore Mars—albeit with robots, not settlers. Over the decades, it sent a fleet of rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance) to wander the plains of the red planet, drilling into rock and searching for ancient traces of water and life. NASA's lenses point inward as well as outward. Its satellites have documented the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of forests, alerting humanity to the planet's precarity. Unlike the technological spin-offs NASA often touts to Congress to justify its existence, these discoveries aren't fleeting breakthroughs in applied engineering. They are the path to humanity's self-knowledge—discoveries that private firms will never pursue, because their value can't be monetized. Put differently, Trump's budget is a cultural document. It reflects a shift in public values. Not so long ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan shaped how Americans thought about space. He did so through elegant books and his television series, Cosmos, which reached an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. At its core, his project was to extol the virtues of the scientific method, which requires and promotes skepticism and humility—a way of thinking that could help society resist the lure of authoritarianism. He exuded wonder, a value he hoped to cultivate in Americans, and harkened back to the humanism of the Enlightenment, which was unfussy about the boundaries between philosophy and science. Every time I see Musk, I think of Sagan—because Musk is his opposite. He is a creature not of science but of engineering. He owes his fortune to the brute force of his rockets, and the awe they inspire. There's nothing humble about his manner. Rather than celebrate the fragile, improvised nature of human existence, Musk seeks to optimize or overwrite it—in the name of evolution, in pursuit of profit, in the vainglorious fulfillment of his adolescent fantasies. Where Sagan envisioned cooperation, Musk embodies the triumph of the individual. Where Sagan cautioned against the unintended consequences of technology, Musk charges headlong into the next disruption. That rush will eventually sweep away many of the old strictures confining him. For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has mulled missions to Mars and never mustered the political will to fund one. Elon Musk is doing just that. SpaceX is planning to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars—neither funded nor formally sanctioned by NASA—in late 2026, timed for planetary alignment. Musk himself pegs the odds of hitting that 2026 window at 50–50. His history of theatrics and unmet deadlines suggests that those odds may be overstated. But this is more than bluster. He is building the most powerful rocket in human history, testing it at a relentless pace, and forcing it toward viability through sheer will. However speculative his timelines, they point to a plausible destination: the day when Musk escapes the gravitational pull of the U.S. government. The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity's loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of liberation.

Business Insider
6 hours ago
- Business Insider
China says it wants the world to work together to govern AI. The US, not so much.
At this weekend's World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, boxing robots thrilled the crowd. But the real heavyweight bout is between the US and China over the future of AI. The theme of the Shanghai conference, which was organized in part by the Chinese government and lasts until Monday, is "global solidarity in the AI era." In his keynote address, Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for a new global organization to coordinate responses to AI advancements. "Overall, global AI governance is still fragmented. Countries have great differences, particularly in terms of areas such as regulatory concepts, institutional rules," he said, speaking in Chinese. "We should strengthen coordination to form a global AI governance framework that has broad consensus as soon as possible." Li's pitch contrasted with comments made by US President Donald Trump earlier in the week. On Wednesday, the US president released his " AI Action Plan" and signed three executive orders. All of them, Trump said, were designed to free AI companies from regulatory burdens. "From this day forward, it'll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence," he said before signing his executive orders. Trump's doctrine will likely benefit American AI companies. Many of them, like OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, submitted recommendations to the president and praised the new policies. However, it's an open question whether forgoing stricter regulations in the United States will benefit humanity. AI industry leaders have long warned about the threats AI could pose — everything from disinformation and economic inequality to total loss of all human control. In 2023, a group of prominent AI scientists, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a one-sentence statement calling for AI regulation. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," it said. Altman said last year that AI could have a "negative impact way beyond the realm of one country." He said the tech should be regulated by an "international agency looking at the most powerful systems and ensuring reasonable safety testing." One way to do that is through an agreed-upon global framework similar to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which is enforced by the United Nations and which all but four countries have signed. The UN tech chief, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, told the AFP on Saturday that the world urgently needed a global deal to regulate AI. "We have the EU approach. We have the Chinese approach. Now we're seeing the US approach. I think what's needed is for those approaches to dialogue," she said. The Trump administration, however, is likely to hinder any such international agreement. Beyond its own effort to loosen restrictions at home, it has largely dismissed other global collaborations in favor of its America First policy. At the Shanghai conference, Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist known as the Godfather of AI, said international cooperation on AI would be difficult. He said few countries agree on basics like how misinformation should be policed. He said there was one subject, however, on which the whole world seems aligned: Humans should not let AI supersede their control. "So on that particular issue, it should be easy to get international collaboration," he said at the conference, adding, however, that it "may be difficult with the current US administration." "But rational countries will collaborate on that," he said.